1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to the field of data transport management and, more specifically, to mitigating main crossbar load using dedicated connections for certain traffic types.
2. Description of the Related Art
In many computing systems, a data transport mechanism is responsible for the physical transfer of data from a source component to a destination component. The source and destination components may include system elements, such as computation engines and memory subsystems. As is well known, the bandwidth of the data transport mechanism is the rate of data transfer between the source and destination components, measured in bits per clock cycle. As is also well known, data is transmitted to and from components within a computing system in collections of bits, where a collection of bits is referred to as a ‘data packet.’ In general, the size of a single data packet may not exceed the bandwidth of the data transport mechanism.
Data that is transmitted from a source component to a destination component may be of various types and sizes. Further, data belonging to certain data types may have different delivery requirements than data belonging to other data types. For example, some data traffic, such as the state information associated with the source component, may need to be flow controlled when the rate of transmission of the source component is different than the rate of transmission of the destination component. Other data traffic, such as buffer space availability, may not need to be flow controlled when the rate of transmission of the source component is different than the rate of transmission of the destination component.
In some systems, the same physical channel within the data transport mechanism is used to transmit data of different types and sizes between two components. In such cases, the physical design of the data transport mechanism is usually optimized to handle the data traffic paradigm set forth by the majority of the data traffic transmitted through the data transport mechanism. For example, if the majority of the data traffic is being transmitted is large data packets, then the physical channel within the data transport mechanism is designed with a high bandwidth. Consequently, for data traffic transmitted in small data packets, the unused bandwidth is wasted. In certain computing systems, where there is a variety of data types being transmitted, optimizing the physical design of the data transportation mechanism based on the data traffic paradigm set forth by the majority of the data traffic may significantly impact performance within the computing system.
As the foregoing illustrates, what is needed in the art is a mechanism for efficiently transmitting different types of data between components within a computing system that, among other things, reduces the incidence of unused bandwidth in such transmissions.